


A lady, unless she wishes to be eccentric, must follow the fashions

by middlemarch



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Getting Ready For A Party, Outtakes, Women's Fashion, costume department, montage effect
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-20
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:14:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 1,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24287203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: Preparations for the reception varied, as might be expected.
Relationships: Alice Green/Percival Squivers, Anne Hastings/OMC, Byron Hale/Anne Hastings, Charlotte Jenkins & Mary Phinney, Eliza Foster/Byron Hale, Emma Green/Frank Stringfellow, Emma Green/Henry Hopkins, Jedediah "Jed" Foster/Mary Phinney, Samuel Diggs/Charlotte Jenkins
Comments: 30
Kudos: 5





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [A Mansion House Murder](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23384296) by [BroadwayBaggins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BroadwayBaggins/pseuds/BroadwayBaggins), [Fericita](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fericita/pseuds/Fericita), [MercuryGray](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryGray/pseuds/MercuryGray), [middlemarch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch), [sagiow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sagiow/pseuds/sagiow), [tortoiseshells](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tortoiseshells/pseuds/tortoiseshells). 



Anne opened the embossed leather box and enjoyed the slight shudder of the spring action. The necklace lay still like a serpent, the ropes of perfectly matched pearls coiled around each other; the velvet beneath it was the deep crimson of cooling blood. Frederick had insisted on it when Anne had thought it an extravagance for a woman rarely attending balls but she could not deny she had liked the weight of the pearls in her hand, the way they warmed to her skin. She would go into battle with her lover’s token against her breast. Byron would not see the jewels for what they were but his wife would and that little blonde cat Alice Squivers. Pearls this fine were made by taking a catastrophe and turning it to advantage; they suited Anne to a tee.


	2. Chapter 2

Emma’s dress was sadly out of fashion, so far from la mode than even Alice would consider if beneath her to make a cutting comment, satisfied with a pitying glance. Emma had done what she could to compensate for the lack of the crinoline, glad at least that the gown had more yardage to work with; a truly gifted seamstress could have made something elegant from it. Emma had made something serviceable, something the men would not notice except perhaps for Dr. Foster, who’d never lost a certain Parisian appreciation that came from that Madame Beaufort. Emma had thanked God the dress was made of cotton and not silk, so much more easily ruined by an inexperienced hand, so much less forgiving of her mistakes. The ribbons she had salvaged from another dress and told herself she had achieved the necessary profusion. She told herself no one cared and so she shouldn’t either. Her dress was evidence of her decline, her failings, and it was another kind of punishment that Henry wouldn’t see what Frank, damn him, would.

Her headdress was made of white roses, a gift from Belinda. A gift, because she could never deserve their fragrant beauty, the diadem easy upon her crown, the coaxed curls at her nape, the rosebuds in a trail. If one came loose, whose hand would catch it up? Who might tuck it within his waistcoat’s pocket, where it could be forgotten—or treasured?


	3. Chapter 3

There wasn’t enough time to make up Jed Foster’s gift into a suitable dress for the reception. Charlotte though it just as well, as it would have startled nearly everyone at Mansion House Hotel except for Mary Foster, who knew the luster of the silk and Charlotte’s willingness to enter the reception with all the bright gold glory of an archangel. She’d have faced a room full of white folks gasping like the bland yellow perch Sam was overly fond of catching on his rare Saturday afternoon off. Perhaps if they hadn’t found themselves smack in the middle of a murder investigation, she might have relished the chance to challenge the collected notions of what she ought to be, but the old hospital still had its taint of wrongly spilt blood. No matter how evil the man had been, he deserved justice from men, his punishment meted out by God alone.

Her costume was unremarkable in every aspect, except—for with Charlotte Jenkins Diggs, there would always be an exception—the point d’Alencon _berthe_ around her shoulders. It was very fine, very delicate, the work of French nuns if Sam was to be believed and she’d found he wasn’t made for lies. He’d a genius for speaking round something, but anything he said, he meant. Mary Foster was made the same way, which must have given Jed Foster endless trouble but it seemed the man liked it better than any sweet, sly cajoling.

The lace lay against her skin like Sam’s nuns had woven a thousand prayers in with the silk thread. There’d been French nuns at Mansion House in ’62; Charlotte remembered one little one with a face like a flower, incapable of deceit. The Mother Superior had walked the halls with her dark habit fluttering and Anne Hastings-as-was never crossed her, nor grizzled old Matron sucking on her clay pipe. Charlotte had found she liked the sensation of the delicate lace on her like petals, like Sam’s fingertips had been the first time. It was something to be beautiful, without qualification.


	4. Chapter 4

A clever young belle in Alexandria learned how to use her fan to advantage. Alice Victoria Green Squivers knew how to use her fan to convey the subtlest message, the deepest cut, the most enticing invitation. The cruelest wound. She had laughed against its silken leaves softly as a dove, held its gilded rivet in her gloved hand as gently as she’d grasp a cocked pistol; she won as many men as she wanted and warned off as many rivals. The Boston matron, despite her unblemished complexion and enviable lashes, was no threat; neither was the Englishwoman who’d given up nursing if she were to be believed. Emma—once she would have been dangerous to Alice’s plans, her features more beautiful, offsetting the burden of her dark hair—but she’d been away so long and had changed her dimples for a crease between her finely drawn brows. Mrs. Hale, well, she was worth watching. Her blue eyes were nearly grey in some lights and she never missed a trick; she’d a way of smiling, gaily except for her bayonet gaze. Any man would be caught, deceived, derailed by her, though not the one she’d left behind for California; the only salvation was Dr. Foster’s utter infatuation with his wife.

Alice tapped her embroidered fan against her upper lip and rued her mother’s imprecations against rouge. She was a married woman and Percival wouldn’t notice if she batted her eyes at him. She’d darkened her brows with a burnt match. She didn’t need to ask permission any longer but she’d yielded when it came to paint, relying on what God had given her. A sweet red mouth made for lies and kisses.


	5. Chapter 5

Eliza Hale had had her shoes made in California, not trusting what she would find in Virginia; she only remembered Alexandria during the War, when sugar had become dear and sorghum was offered in its place; when it behooved a lady to pretend she was not bothered by the dusty roads and the endless strange men, somehow rendered tolerable by their uniforms. She’d left when Jedediah hadn’t, when he’d finally broken his promise to her incontrovertibly, expecting the War to be adequate explanation for the sundering of their marriage. He’d left in a half-dozen ways already, somehow not expecting her to notice his distracted gaze, his uneasy nights, the way his voice altered when he spoke of the hospital, of the new Head Nurse who didn’t know her place, nor which scalpel he preferred, who thought she deserved some recognition for being a Baroness in a charnel-house… He’d said all of it over meals she’d conjured from markets full of greens and cornmeal and not much else. How could she have expected a proper pair of evening shoes to come from such a place? 

She wore a pair of Louis XV silk heels in the rich shade of dahlia she’d favored since it had first been the rage. They were not made to match her dress. They were made for dancing, for the curve of the heel and the subtler curve of her corseted body; they were made for the look in Byron’s eye when she raised her hem and for Jedediah’s. She was certain he’d notice. He’d explained once how the human eye was made to observe motion first and then color and there’d be both, the flick of her wrist as she turned up the flounce, the slight cant of her slender ankle. His Mrs. Foster couldn’t do the same; she’d be settled in chair for the duration of the ball, a matron among matrons, required to cede the floor. She might continue her investigations thus, her keen glance not missing anything, not least how Eliza would be in command of the room, no matter what Mrs. Squivers imagined. Mary Foster might discover the dead man’s murderer—she was said to be fond of solving problems. Eliza hadn’t come to Alexandria for that.


	6. Chapter 6

Mary’s ballgown was blue. 

Again. 

She was not sure if Jedediah would remember the dress she’d worn to the Green’s ball during the War, the one that had been ruined during Aurelia’s emergency hysterectomy; it had been an extravagance to bring a taffeta ballgown to the hospital and she could not regret its loss very much, though it had reminded her of who she had been before she had become Nurse Mary. It was Mrs. von Olnhausen’s best dress, because she had never been called Baroness by anyone in Manchester, not even in jest. Gustav, at his most mirthful, might call her _meine Baronin_ in a very grave tone; this was most often when she was scrubbing the kitchen’s flagstones or red-cheeked in an apron, stirring something on their temperamental stove.

The dress she’d brought to Mansion House Hotel was watered silk in bleu de Lyon, a hue richly deep and vivid, darker than the dusk of summer sky but with something of that light in it. Jedediah, a Marylander brought up on the bay, preferred the seashore but she was reminded of a lake she’d loved in the New Hampshire woods, the blue of the irises that her mother had grown. Mary did not care for the elaborate styles of fashionable dress, always preferring narrow plaits instead of wide, lace or bows but not both; she had acceded to the dressmaker’s insistence on trimming the dress with a quantity of silver lace and velvet insets with as good grace as she could muster, reminding the woman she would be wearing a necklace of moonstones and matching earrings. She was lucky enough her hair curled naturally, so she did not require the assistance of a maid to arrange it in the intricate, artful style of braids and falling ringlets required for an evening reception. She’d wear a comb inset with moonstones at her crown and long for the moment she could take it out.

Jedediah should prove an adequate aid in her toilette. She did not need her corset laces tightened and she had been able to manage her petticoat, silk stockings and their garters on her own. The bodice of the ballgown wasn’t terribly complicated, though he was quite good at finessing something complicated with his surgeon’s hands; he much preferred demonstrating this in removing her clothes, providing her with a running commentary on his incomparable skill. Or rather, he had done, before Johnny’s birth. It seemed likely he would return to his amusing self-adulation while helping her getting ready for Alice Squivers’s ball for Byron Hale, ignoring Alice, ignoring Byron, most studiously ignoring his first wife though perhaps not the murdered man in the small pantry. His voice would be just that much louder than a murmur against her bare neck; he would rest his hands on her shoulders after he secured the clasp of her necklace, then let them slip to her waist. She was still slender after the babies, which she should not be proud of but was, and they both knew how much the other liked his hands there, keeping her close.

Mary’s ballgown was blue. Again. She hoped, not devoutly but sincerely, that this one would not be stained with blood. And she hoped this time, she would have at least once waltz with Jedediah, however slow and graceless she might be. To be held in his arms, in his admiring, tender gaze, would be enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Peterson's Magazine (1842–1898) was an American magazine focused on women.
> 
> In 1842, Charles Jacobs Peterson and George Rex Graham, partners in the Saturday Evening Post, agreed that a new women's journal to compete with Godey's Lady's Book would be a good venture. Peterson launched Ladies' National Magazine as a cheaper alternative to Godey's ($2 per year instead of $3) in January 1842. Ann S. Stephens was an early editor and substantial contributor to the periodical, and there was some attempt to portray her as running the show (for marketing purposes, perhaps), although Peterson was still in charge. Emily H. May was another early and frequent contributor. The name of the publication had some variation in its early years, but by 1848 was titled Peterson's Ladies' National Magazine, and the Peterson prefix would always remain. From 1855 to 1892, it was called Peterson's Magazine, and thus by that name it is remembered.
> 
> The title of this piece is from Peterson's :)


End file.
